


A Noiseless Patient Spider

by Skypewriter



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Depression, Johnlock - Freeform, M/M, Noiseless Patient Spider poem, POV First Person, Post-Reichenbach, Sherlock and John reunion, Walt Whitman - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-22
Updated: 2014-02-22
Packaged: 2018-01-13 09:09:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1220653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skypewriter/pseuds/Skypewriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock has returned to 221B after two years, to find that John is not at home. He waits all night and into the next day for him; John has spent the night at a pub as he copes with depression before he finally returns to the flat for what he thinks will be the last time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Noiseless Patient Spider

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [A Noiseless Patient Spider](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/37168) by Walt Whitman. 



> This switches back and forth between Sherlock and John, beginning with Sherlock. The lines of Whitman's poem separate their thought processes.

Darkness is a quiet character, a black consuming presence of silent noise, sharpening our senses for the dullest of motions, the trickle of action. The peppering of dust that floats through the room reflects tiny prickles of light, tiny stars apathetically shifting their presences softly throughout the flat. The morning light enters slowly through the pulled drapes, not bothering with that upon which it sheds its insistence, its routinely dull livelihood. The tiny orbs of light are his soul, and he mocks me as he glides through my line of sight, reminding me what consequences I have chosen to endure as a result of my thoughtless abandonment of him. Every speck of dust screams at my abandonment, and he screams too; he screams my name, and it is the cruelness of what we create for ourselves as we pass recklessly through the turning days that I scream his name too, I shout it, I beg with it, it hisses through my teeth, it turns my stomach, it pierces my heart so finely I feel as though my flesh has been punctured by an apparition of regret that has so consumed my being for the past two years that I have forced it to take a concrete form, allowed it to physically destroy me. I have sat here, all night, my fingers folded together and pressed into my chin as if they mimic the stillness of the night, as if that aids meditation, as if that would create a solution.

It won’t.

If there is anything in the world that can alter a moment in time, a brief passing of heightened awareness, eager senses, lustful thought, and mold it into a cast of permanence, then let it be here, let it consume me. I need it, I need the memories, beyond a file in my mind, tucked away and without emotion. The world tilts into the transformation of the passing of a day and into the new one, and it acknowledges that the change goes beyond the ephemeral sunset into the spring of the new, it realizes with me, and turns with me, and cries out with me in despair. But I will be patient, I will not fear. Alone protects me. In the essence of our perfunctory existence we shudder as the feeling of anxious time creeps into view, seething with its expectations cut short of what we consider godliness, a calmly crying need for time to expand itself in methodical torture as we resist the pull of nature in favor of self-consumed immortality. I have a need for that now, for the slowing of time, for its reversal into what once was a lilting routine, an act made smooth simply through his presence in my life, for his existence.

It does not matter. It does not make a difference. I do not matter. I do not make a difference. The pin prick of youthful naivety comes fast, sharpened as it aged past its due date. I don’t know how to handle that from which I should have suffered so irrationally in my days of childhood. 

He who said that we beat against the current knew it is so because the current beat first against us. The world does not want you here. You, unique. You, different. You are insignificant, and the world wants you to know it. But our lives spring up from the fountains of hope, clear water in action against the spread of reality into the darkness we frequent in our dreams, terrors we cannot control of our inability to create substance for ourselves that might stretch out our time on earth into something worthwhile. 

But I can control that substance; I can create it for myself. I can mold my future. I could, at least. But the independent variable was him. I could not have hypothesized how much I needed him until I left him and ruined the entire experiment. Perhaps that is a lowly method of describing my life, but my existence is an experiment, barely worth the turn of a head, a curt nod, a soft glance. No, not worth it at all. But John – John was worth everything, John is the constant now. John was the constant. He gave me control. He gave me control, and I crumbled in the overwhelming presence of ignorance, polluting his countenance in the face of my selfishness. 

What ambiguous difference there is between mortality and hell  
exists in a pathetic tiny space between the two  
which holds all of the happiness and perfection in our starlit universe  
that we can imagine  
then muster  
then control  
then enslave,  
until the bright little space begins to flicker  
and the space narrows  
and the space closes.  
Dust will not return to dust,  
because we have forever thrived in the dirt.  
So we'll consume ourselves,  
pulling apart as we collapse  
into nothing.

I will be tolerant. I can wait. I’ll wait for you, to give me a sign, and I’ll wait for you to come, I’ll beg your forgiveness, I will frequent your glances with an involuntary declaration of my addiction to you, and you will understand the intensity with which I have failed. 

 

 

 _A noiseless, patient spider_

 

 

I cannot return to the flat tonight. I’ll die in this pub. Bring me something in which I can drown. 

You stood there, you watched me. Did you see me falling? You know I saw you falling, but I fell with you. You crashed to the ground, and the silence was deafening because all of the noise of my life that you cut out when you saved me came rushing back, just as all of the whispers and murmurs and moments you sent cascading through my being when we first met fell into silence, fell into nothingness, as your body cracked against the pavement. And all of this, as a horrid resolution to a confession with which you had just tortured me. The churning pit of that lie, the unacceptable alternative to the reality you created for me, a reality that was better than anything I had known in my life before you.

I fell with you – oh, god! I crashed, reckless waves of torture as the world tilted and smashed through the atmosphere into blackness, and do you know the worst part? Everyone went back to normal. They saw me and their eyes spoke of sadness, carefully discerned the heartbreak that brimmed and spilled over against my burning anger at my failure to see what was coming before it was too late. But they saw me, and their lips gave way to words of monotony, words that glanced off of their mouths with a perfunctory crispness, a need to rip the world back into a place of normality, a place that existed without you. The world does not exist without you. I do not exist without you. Why me? I don’t need to ask why you – you were always the answer. You were my friend. 

You perched on your ledge and flung your existence into the wind, watching it flit away into the cool air of the London afternoon and then drip down silently through the overcast sky, but did you not realize that I was drowning? I was drowning, and you pulled me to the surface, a smooth retrieval of the dying heart of a stranger you casually chose to be your flat mate. I was struggling, and I was so small. The world was a blur, a haziness experienced by those who are on the verge of blindness – there were no faces to recognize, no streets to wander, no doorknobs to be turned. But just as the murkiness of reality was pulling me down into a permanent desire to end my life, you pulled me out into the world. I could see you; you weren’t some hazy figure. You were Sherlock Holmes. You were as sharp as they come, Sherlock. And I focused on you, no, I didn’t just focus on you, I took a risk and hinged my quickly decaying existence on you. But now, you have pushed me back under, and I am drowning once again, because there are again no streets down which I can turn that do not hold a flash of your eyes, no music to be plucked from the strings of an abandoned violin in the heart of the city on Baker Street, and if that were not the heart of the city, then I am lost, because it is in my heart where that violin sits, rising precariously from time to time to sing me to sleep, just so that it may sink me into the depths of a nightmare. And even that was emptiness, a paradoxical hell, because it wasn’t a nightmare, it was a reality that was not whisked away when I opened my eyes, when I realized you were gone. It wasn’t a fucking magic trick. It was the worst thing I have ever had to experience and ever will. And I watched you fall from your cliff, I watched you shatter my soul. We are of the same soul; you and I, and half of me is missing, is dead. So in what condition do you think the other half is? 

I am in agony.

Did you think you were in solitude? Did you have no other option, alone on that rooftop? Did you think you had no one to whom you could turn? I could have helped you, no matter what you think you needed to do. I would have died for you, but for the love of God, I never wanted you to die for me. 

 

 

_I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated_

 

 

The chance to alter reality is daunting; what seems to the common man an impossible task is to the greater mind merely the wrong perspective: the perspective is of society, of which the individual is a cross section – and the individual, a seething pot of impulses, bound to the culture of the assumed generalized mind. But the individual in today’s world is a consumer, meticulously self-gratifying as he is unaware of the illusion of reality he has created for himself. Through this, we live in our own spheres of self consummation, decidedly unheeding of outside influence, and thus can shift our shallow little existences into the molds we choose to define. Isolation is mistaken for power, when in truth the greatest substance that falls into our molds is the stuff that makes up the ones in our lives whom without we cannot function. I have made that mistake. I took my moment of solitary being and chose my own fate.

Now, I fear the worst. I fear in changing my fate, I have destroyed my soul.

Perhaps this would not have been the worst outcome in the past, had I considered the option of faking my death in some other circumstance. Instead, it would be the thrill of the shock, the beating pulse of the city as I watched it react, and then it would be a valiant return, my rise from the dead, met in a disconnected and detached joy by the people in my life. But this is not that past. No – this is John Watson. And with whatever reckless abandonment I chose to treat my soul, I failed to understand that I had passed part of it on to him, I was living through him. I was seeing the good in people, the importance of their little spheres of mortality that they had created so neatly, and yet had cracked in so many fatal ways. And now, after the fall, I realize that though it was not I who crashed to the pavement that fateful day, it was instead, my conscience. And that conscience, however absent it had been previously to John, was in full now, unforgiving and unbelieving of the hurt through which I am putting John in this moment. I cannot exist without him, because he is a part of me that I have not only abandoned, but a part of me that is also now slowly dying without him. 

The sun has risen farther into the sky, and I can feel it filtering through the curtains onto the back of my neck. This flat feels abandoned, a huge expansion of emptiness, but Mycroft is certain John still resides here, despite my recalcitrance at the notion that John could allow himself to hold onto what I cannot cease to guess are torturous memories. 

 

 

_Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,_

 

 

I could not leave Baker Street. You realize that, don’t you? Did you think I would leave? No, any normal person would leave, stretch back out their broken wings and seek shelter in unfamiliarity, but I have no wings, Sherlock. I never did. I was never more than a quiet figure wandering through the smog of the passing days, lacking that societally expected purpose. But you, you are a giant. You made up for everything I was not, and you pulled me in to the swirl of your life and forced my suffering to evaporate in the face of excitement. And when that excitement became familiar enough to become contentment, I realized it was not just the thrill of experiencing your life, but of experiencing you as well. 

I was so tired  
of waiting for my world  
to stop careening in all directions  
but it spun and spun and would not stop  
until I felt the only thing left to do  
was to get off this sick ride but  
I still could not slow down  
down, down, down until  
you came along  
and stopped  
me in my  
tracks.

I have tried. I went back to the clinic, I wandered in and out, day after day, I saw a myriad of dull people shift through my life and the only part of the practice that gave me any sense of comfort at all was the fact that maybe I was helping these boring people. Every person I helped was an ant in comparison to you, Sherlock, but the more people I helped, the better I was able to convince myself that I was making up for the fact that in the end, I could not help you. 

I have tried, Sherlock, I have tried so many different strategies to convince myself to forget about you. I visited Molly for a while, I experienced her day to day workings, the mechanisms with which she manages to push herself through this dull continuation of existence. And she does well, too, I wish you knew how well, you never did realize that the stability of her presence could be an alternative to the lackluster appearance of the daily people who flitted in and out of our lives, you never understood she didn’t have to fall into that tiresome category of human being. But you always allowed yourself to place everyone you met into that classification, didn’t you? What happened to you, Sherlock? Why did your mind work that way? Because in what now feels like another lifetime, I once found the variety of people I encountered each day to be exhilarating, summaries of countenances not really that different from my own, ephemeral windows into the universe of another mind; and now, I think like you did, Sherlock. Everyone is the same, aren’t they? Mulling about in the shadows and hoping for a moment of unexpectedness to lift them out of their destitution, hoping it can sustain them for a long enough period of time until the next surprise trickles haphazardly into their lives. The most successful of these poor creatures can go for the longest periods of time without that color. And the least successful… I am the least successful. I shift from job to job, casting myself into different positions in clinics, in hospitals; I even thought about the army again, Sherlock, god…

And yet there you were, always operating as I am now. What happened to you? Because it was the pain of feeling you wrenched from my life that has trapped me in this state of hateful apathy at the human beings who twinkle in and out around me, at this repetitive society in which I live. I wanted you to see the good in people, Sherlock, I could have shown you how good it feels to be invested in another person. What a bitter notion though, because this investment I feel in you is killing me. I am searching for the answer, I have racked my brain, considered dozens of possibilities for why you would go against everything I knew you to be and remove yourself from this world, but all I experience is a void. 

 

 

_It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself_

 

 

It is nearing four o’clock in the afternoon, and I am still waiting. I have gazed around the flat for much too long now, and I am feeling restless. I give the thought a consideration, then shift myself out of my chair and into John’s. The tug of the fabric in his seat unleashes a thin layer of dust that seethes through the room, adding to the feeling of vacancy that is engulfing me. This chair has been vacant as well; it has been unused. This hard fabric against me tells a story long past, and the room feels as though it is speeding up.

I’m back, I’m going to make things right. But I don’t think that’s possible anymore. I am filled, consumed with longing, and I am filled with that same level of fear, aching in my chest as it curls up around my heart and reminds me that John may never have even loved me as I love him. 

 

 

_Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them_

 

 

I love you. Had I ever spoken those words, they would have been meaningless, filled with human filth, watered down to a standard of lust that is an insult to your memory as I think to myself those three words over and over again. You are of the angels, you deserved nothing less than the ethereal caress of a murmur against your skin, full of the wisps of golden sentiment and embedded irretrievably in the core of my soul. 

I will leave. I will lift my life back up and carry you on; I will let you live through me. I will go back to the flat, and pick up my things and say goodbye to Mrs. Hudson and I will leave you – oh, my god. My heart is breaking, Sherlock, it is a dust now, it has ripped me apart with its shards to which it was reduced at the sight of your body, broken on the pavement. And my inaction has dulled the shards, weakened them down and now – the thought of moving on – they have been reduced to a dust. A dust covers the flat, did you know? Mrs. Hudson doesn’t come up to say hello anymore. The dust is you, Sherlock. You glitter in the flat at three o’clock in the morning when I bury my head in your chair and breathe in the very little substance that is left of you, and watch the lights from the street cascade lazily into the flat. You flicker through the rays of those streetlamps, Sherlock. You stir up as I shift against you, picture you in my arms, you stir up in my mind and it gives me a headache – and you settle back down, succumbing to the gravitational pull of your fate just as you did two years ago on the roof. 

I will leave, Sherlock. I will stand and step outside of my body, turn back in pain to gaze upon myself, my tortured form, my emaciated heart. That is my stance, that is the condition of my soul, and I cannot abandon myself, fling myself from this earth as you did, with the knowledge that you still exist within me poisoning my mind. 

 

 

_And you, O my Soul, where you stand,_

 

 

I am not ready for this. You hate me. You’ll yell, you’ll leave, you’ll cast me out. 

I can hear you, your breathing; I can hear you hesitate as you open the door to the flat, to our flat, as you shift your weight towards the stairs.

You are half way up – you move on the stair step that creaks. 

You will despise me.

And then I really will fall from the roof, John. 

 

 

_Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,_

 

 

There are times when I can collect my thoughts,  
and cast from me my insatiable desires,  
just as the sun spreads its velvet blanket of gold  
across the lazily rolling hills and the leafy canopies protecting them,  
as the land lovingly accepts daylight’s need for rest.  
But as a creature of this earth,  
thus flawed in all ways and in none,  
I become entangled in my wanton thoughts,  
allowed only to scream helplessly out at the howling winds  
that steal the lights from my world,  
and all the color they behold.  
All this, simply because  
my relentless mind  
finds cruel pleasure  
in forcing thoughts of you into my head,  
simply so that I may be reminded  
that I will never see you again.

 

 

_Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;_

 

 

The door opens and I brace myself, trying to maintain my composure as I watch him enter the room, face cast to the ground.

My heart is aching. 

He is lovely, a picture of uniformity, a sad beautifulness about him as he stands there, fumbling to return his key to his pocket. I inhale quietly, and remember that this will be the first and last time I glance upon this man when he is in this state of loss, a state of mourning. The shadows on the wall across from me have grown long, and the late afternoon drifts in and out of the room, a soft golden light glimmering in the air of the dusty flat. 

He hears me breathe in, and looks up. We do not move.

I do not know what to say. I am unraveling. The chair beneath me is nonexistent; it is gone, no longer some enchanted symbol of John, it holds no fear of his absence. I pull myself to my feet. I am maintaining my composure. I am maintaining my composure. I step gingerly in his direction. I am maintaining my composure.

His eyes… his soul. They absorb the entirety of mine. Every fiber of my being longs to settle into them, become lost in them, to wonder. Maybe I stumble. Maybe I trip on the edge of the carpet, place a tentative hand against the wall to catch myself. I don’t know what I do, but he against me, pressed into me. I wrap my arms around him, because it is the only thing that makes sense to do in the entire world. My hands press into his jumper, feel the coarseness of the material, the warmth of his skin beneath it, and I pull him in tighter, lowering my head to his shoulder. I am shaking, but I do not notice. It is John who I notice now, who has his arms around my neck, his hands caressing my hair, and then his arms fall to my lower back, and he clings to me, he rests his head into the fold of the collar of my coat. 

I am plagued with worry, positive that he is about to pull back, about to knock me to the ground, to yell at me. I loosen my grip, wanting to allow him his space, but instead, I feel moisture on my neck; he is crying, pulling me back towards him. I am uncomprehending. I reach up to his head, running my fingers through his soft hair, and I am whispering to him, I am begging for his forgiveness, I am telling him I love him –

He has pulled back now, his eyes locked on mine, and I take his face in my hands, holding him gently as I realize the weight of how much he means to me, how precious he is to me, how vital he is to my existence. I am falling apart in his gaze, and he becomes blurry in front of me as tears form in my eyes. 

I feel his lips against mine. The embrace lays the ground work; the kiss fuses our souls.

 

 

_Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;_

 

 

Existing is variable; love reacts, and life results.

I am alive. An essence of beauty has returned itself to this world, and is in the air and the wind and the trees; it smells of coldness and of smoke and of insurmountable love that ensconces the world in a soft blanket of fog that is so comforting in this frigid city. 

I put on a jacket and step outside of the flat with a preemptive brace against the chill. I find inexplicable comfort in my knowledge that this feeling will always return at this time of year: these neutral colors and fallen leaves and tight hugs; candles and rain and rosy cheeks and the notion that to feel alive must be the only true desire of all creatures. I for one do never wish to be without love’s brace, without Sherlock, and the freezing air does not cut me, but instead holds me even higher in its extremity. 

I am in love with an idea of life: of the tiny pieces that mold together coincidentally in the form of a human being, of the eternal essence of complete individuality through our own intricate design. I will tell Sherlock; I will make him understand, the integral role he plays in my life, the need I have for him to slow down and block out the troubles that pick at him; and I need him to know when he does come to a halt, I am here to take him into my arms and to never let him feel so alone again. What do they matter, those foolish schedules and prudish deadlines? We are no machines, nor do I welcome that notion. He is with me, and we will teach each other to embrace the sights that have no surface meaning, for they above all know what it truly is to hear the melodies of the river and the percussion of the rain, the laughter of the flowers that cast out their sorrow through their shadows. I will tell you this, Sherlock, I will tell you this, you, who are the love of my life and my soul mate:

Cast out the thoughts of enemies, and fill yourself to the brim with hugs and kisses and closed eyes and soft touches. Feel the wind as it howls and its cold, cold gusts and think not of your troubles and fears; but, instead, of that moment exactly, and how one day you will remember not the wind, but the love to which you clung so fiercely, so passionately, so righteously: because you are alive, and oh, how perfect you are.

 

 

_Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul. ___


End file.
